Red Hat: Go Big or Play It Safe?

Red Hat appears to be held to a different standard than its peers, one that keeps it safe on a pedestal where it can do comparatively little damage to its competitors.

The reason seems to be that it's an open-source company, and open-source companies are apparently supposed to live lives of virginal purity and restraint. So, in response to my suggestion that Dell consider buying Red Hat, a friend countered, "But this would destroy Red Hat's hardware independence."

It's a good point, and one that is similarly raised whenever it is suggested that Oracle, IBM, or anyone else could be in the market for Red Hat. For example, I've heard it said that Red Hat executives are loathe to upset any database vendor by acquiring MySQL (before Sun did) or EnterpriseDB (PostgreSQL)...